Dubai is getting a $56,000-a-year private school for rich kids

A new super-luxury school is coming to Dubai, where parents might pay up to $56,000 a year for their children’s education. GEMS Education, one of the biggest private school companies in the world, is building this $100 million campus.

The school, which will cost $100 million to build, is going all out with fancy features. It will have a huge auditorium that fits 600 people, an Olympic swimming pool, and even a football field that helicopters can land on. Students will get to work with robots and build go-karts, which they can test on a special track.

“The current ascendancy of Dubai, the UAE is pretty undeniable,” GEMS Chief Executive Officer Dino Varkey said in an interview. “As a consequence, the market has matured sufficiently to allow us to effectively create a new benchmark.”

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When the school opens in August, it will only take young students (similar to nursery through elementary school in America). Parents will need to pay between $32,000 and $41,000 per year, depending on the child’s age. Later, when they start taking older students, the price will go up to $56,000 – about the same as some of America’s top private schools like Phillips Academy in Andover.

This will be the most expensive school in Dubai, which is saying something since Dubai already has some of the world’s priciest schools. Since foreign workers’ children usually can’t go to local public schools, private schools like GEMS are their main option.

GEMS started as a family business run by an Indian family 60 years ago and has grown into one of the world’s biggest private school companies. Last year, they got a huge investment of $2 billion from a group led by Brookfield Asset Management, making it one of the biggest business deals in the region’s history.

“If you compare to some of the more expensive day schools around the world, we’d still be incredibly competitive and below those benchmarks,” Varkey said.

“What we’ve seen over the course of the last three years in terms of the reallocation and relocation of families and wealth has been pretty apparent and visible,” Varkey said. The new school “would be targeting what we would think of as sort of the affluent parent body,” he said.

Dubai has been attracting lots of wealthy people lately, especially since the pandemic. People from Russia, India, and Western countries are moving there for the sunshine, safety, and low taxes. Many work in finance or cryptocurrency trading and are willing to pay top dollar for their kids’ education.

While the city’s private schools are growing – they now have 387,441 students in 227 schools – these high costs are tough on regular families. In fact, 80% of families in the UAE (which includes Dubai) spend more than a third of their monthly income on school fees.